Film Reviews by griggs

Two people trying to claw back a bit of glory, using each other as the ladder — that’s the real story here. The romance between Chance and Heavenly barely gets a seat at the table; the film is more interested in watching Chance get squeezed between Alexandra Del Lago and Boss Finley.

Paul Newman is all charm and panic, a man who’s mistaken swagger for a survival plan. Geraldine Page is magnificently brittle as Alexandra, terrified of becoming yesterday’s news, while Ed Begley’s Boss Finley is hypocrisy wearing a suit. I kept getting pulled into the political ugliness, even when it crowded out the quieter drama.

The symbolism gets laid on with a trowel — Tennessee Williams was never subtle about that sort of thing. Still, this overlooked adaptation has a strange pull. Two damaged people clawing at each other for oxygen, while everyone else reaches for the knife.

I always liked Anthony Bourdain’s writing and television work, so Tony had an easy head start with me. Yet it never really got the pan hot enough to sizzle.

Dominic Sessa plays a solid, watchable Bourdain, all swagger and nerve, though you can see him working for it in the quieter scenes. Leo Woodall brings real heat as his wayward co-worker, stealing scenes with an energy the rest of the film could use more of. Antonio Banderas is warm and unhurried as the mentor figure, finding a gentleness that never curdles into sentimentality.

The trouble is that the film borrows Bourdain’s outline without ever finding his voice. There are flashes of the wit and hunger I remember from his books and shows, but they feel quoted rather than lived in. Nothing is especially wrong with it; it’s pleasant and well acted. I just found it oddly easy to forget — a menu that reads better than it tastes.

Charles Laughton spends the first act on his deathbed and the rest of it clearly having the time of his life, which tells you exactly where the fun lives here.

Deanna Durbin matches him with bright composure and a wonderfully straight face, even as the deception she has helped create gets messier with every scene. Their scenes together carry the film; you can practically watch them egging each other on.

The plot itself is thin, propped up on fibs that wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny, and I stopped caring about the logic fairly early on. Fortunately, the set-pieces keep finding new ways to turn the nonsense into entertainment.

A silly premise, played by people who clearly knew exactly how much fun silliness could be.

Mackendrick can frame a ship like nobody’s business — shame the story never quite comes aboard.

A High Wind in Jamaica throws pirates, unruly children and Anthony Quinn speaking Spanish into the mix. All the ingredients for something wild. Instead, it just sort of drifts.

The shots of sea and sail are gorgeous and unhurried. The tone, though, can’t decide whether it’s an adventure yarn or something darker, and I came out the other side strangely unbothered by it all.

Quinn brings plenty of swagger, while James Coburn is oddly quiet and watchful beside him.

Handsome scenery, but not much of a voyage.

Kinshasa here is sweaty, restless, and lit up like a fever dream — Riva rolls back into town with stolen fuel and appetites to match, and chaos follows him around like a bad smell.

I'll admit it took me a while to warm to him — he's the kind of guy who mistakes confidence for a plan. The plot gets a bit tangled: too many gangsters, and a romance with more possession in it than tenderness.

Nora gets treated as property for long stretches, which is the film's biggest flaw — even if that possessiveness reflects what the whole film is about, it doesn't make the objectification any less troubling. The film also makes unexpected room for a lesbian couple — the Commandant and her lover — whose relationship is drawn with more care and dignity than the surrounding pulp might suggest.

What's stuck with me is the atmosphere — neon, heat, real danger, a city that feels alive in its own right. Chaotic, over the top in places, and completely gripping anyway.

It's uneven, and the thriller machinery creaks more than once. Still, as a slice of Congolese pulp that reached an international audience, this one lives up to its name — viva indeed.

Nearly three hours of tartan spectacle that plays fast and loose with pretty much everything except the character names.

I'll admit, the scale gets me — horses, mud, Mel Gibson bellowing at the sky like he's auditioning for Scottish Opera.

The trouble is the history barely survives contact with the screenplay. William Wallace didn’t do most of this, and the Scots are dressed in kilts centuries too early. Even the Wallace Monument once had a Gibson-faced statue in its car park.

Switch your brain to spectacle mode, though, and it mostly works. The battles land. The villains sneer on cue. Gibson gives it everything, script be damned.

A Hollywood daydream in a kilt centuries too early, having a whale of a time being wrong.

King Hu clearly believes patience is a virtue, and the first hour of this one tests mine to the edge of enlightenment. Lots of scheming in a haunted-looking fort, gorgeously shot.

Then the big fight arrives and the film comes into its own — bamboo forests, bodies flying, monks turning up looking mildly disappointed in everyone. It's thrilling stuff, and the film loosens up once it stops explaining itself.

The ending is a proper puzzle, in the best way. The story doesn't need three hours to tell itself. Still, the second half is gorgeous enough to earn back my patience. Frustrating, beautiful, occasionally baffling — worth sticking with.

Weimar Germany gave the world cabaret, moral ruin, and an early version of what would become Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch. Rath wakes to find his bird has, well, ceased to be — his housekeeper just shrugs and lobs it in the boiler. Grim, funny, a typical German expressionist "Dead Parrot," and a surprisingly cheeky, foreboding way to open a tragedy.

I wish the rest of the film kept that energy up. Jannings shuffles through his own unravelling at a stately, occasionally sluggish pace, and there are stretches in the middle where you can feel the story circling its own ending rather than committing to it. Dietrich's Lola, meanwhile, barely lifts a finger and still owns every scene she's in — playful, unbothered, impossible to compete with. Rath is finished the moment she looks at him; the film just takes its time admitting it.

Then the final ten minutes hit, and the film finally shows its teeth. Cruel, cold, and hard to shake.

Uneven and slow to ignite — but that ending lands like a slap.

I’ve never been a Star Trek person, but I get why this is the one people point to. Kirk, Spock and McCoy click, and their history does more work than the plot.

Ricardo Montalbán is having the time of his life as Khan — bare chest, Shakespearean rage, chewing scenery like it owes him money. Given the title, I wanted more wrath than the standing-around-giving-orders we get, though he commits to every syllable.

Everything else is gloriously cheesy — dialogue, effects, and a Genesis device that’s basically a magic wand with a PowerPoint deck.

The quieter stuff lands hardest: Kirk facing age and regret, and an ending that hit harder than any space battle.

Not the classic I’d been promised, but the crew make a good case.

Alec spends the film being lied to, lying in return, and slowly losing track of which one he’s actually doing. Richard Burton plays him heavy-lidded and worn down, all dry contempt and buried feeling. I kept watching his eyes rather than following the plot, which gets knotty by the second act.

The tradecraft is bleak, and the photography does little to soften it. The ending still catches you off guard once you understand what Alec has been protecting.

Frosty company throughout, but gripping enough to hold me there. Burton carries the whole thing on that exhausted face.

Jodorowsky empties every drawer he owns and tips the lot onto the screen: alchemists, gold toads, a small army of naked extras, and enough tarot symbolism to fill several lifetimes. I sat there unsure whether I was being enlightened or mugged.

The visuals carry it — ravishing one minute, revolting the next, occasionally both in the same shot. The plot is mostly a clothesline for the next provocation, taking swings at religion, capitalism, and the spiritual grift.

The only problem is the symbolism piles up so fast it starts narrating itself, and the jabs lose their sting after enough escalations. A streak of mischief saves it from tipping into pure self-importance, though — Jodorowsky's clearly having too much fun to be entirely serious about his own sermon.

Overblown, gorgeous, exhausting in places — but rarely boring.

Bergman's hotel-room chamber piece runs on heat and silence: two sisters trapped together in a city whose language nobody speaks, saying almost nothing while everything curdles underneath.

Ester is dying slowly upstairs with her translations and her cough. Anna's downstairs, sweating through her dress and eyeing up strangers in the bar. I found myself leaning forward during the quiet bits, half expecting someone to finally say the thing nobody's saying. The city outside doesn't help, close and humid, with tanks rumbling past like nobody's told them there's a plot to interrupt.

It doesn't explain itself and doesn't want to. Anna ends up with a man in the corridor mostly because it's something to do with her hands, not because she actually wants him there.

Austere, stubbornly uncomfortable, and still rattling round my head.

Bergman packs a whole family's worth of damage onto one island over a single day and night—and somehow makes it feel bigger than most three-hour epics, despite running under ninety minutes.

Harriet Andersson is devastating as Karin, drifting between lucidity and something that looks a lot like possession. I found myself holding my breath every time she left the room, waiting to see what she'd bring back with her.

Nobody in this family actually helps anyone. David is busy mining his daughter's breakdown for material, Martin's kindness doesn't stretch far enough, and Minus is left to grow up alone in the middle of it all.

The spider vision is genuinely chilling, but it's the quiet scenes that stick: faces in doorways, pauses that go on too long. That hard black-and-white light does most of the emotional work.

Bleak, yes. But it ends on something close to tenderness—and that's what got me.

Meiko Kaji barely speaks, yet her stillness is more unsettling than all the shouting around her. One glare from Scorpion could curdle the prison tea.

Shunya Ito spends his debut doing time in two genres: women-in-prison exploitation and an art film having a particularly lurid breakdown. Nudity and sadism rub shoulders with theatrical sets, wild colour filters and camera angles that appear to have escaped custody. One flashback unfolds across shifting stage scenery, bringing the story to a halt for some shameless visual showing off. Fair enough—it earns the interruption.

The guards and male authorities are such spectacular wrong'uns that their cruelty eventually becomes savage satire. Even the endless digging punishment receives more care than many films manage for their climax.

I found the middle padded, with a basic revenge story serving a longer sentence than necessary. Exploitation and artistry remain uneasy cellmates, forever rattling each other's bars.

Give this one credit — the title’s pulling double duty, nodding to the genre while pointing east on the map. That feels deliberate.

A crew of German construction workers turn up in rural Bulgaria to build a hydroelectric plant, then start acting like the new sheriffs in town. Grisebach clearly knows her Westerns — there’s a horse, a standoff over water rights, a fella riding into a one-horse village — though the guns stay mostly in their holsters. She sends migrant labour east for once, then lets it collide with local suspicion. It also brings to mind the anxieties about eastern European workers weaponised during the Brexit campaign, when migrant labour became a convenient scapegoat. The film makes that old argument travel in the opposite direction.

Meinhard Neumann, in his first acting role, carries the whole thing on one unreadable, weathered face. He’s closer to James Stewart than Clint Eastwood: a soft-spoken man trying to earn his place one awkward ride, poker hand and village encounter at a time. His face does most of the talking.

Tension builds through small stuff — a borrowed horse, a stolen flag, missing water, bruised male pride. Every minor slight starts wearing a gun belt.

The pace is more dusty trail than runaway stagecoach, and the ending leaves a few threads dangling in the wind. Still, I’d happily sit through another two hours of these people just talking. A quiet standoff of a film, with plenty of frontier spirit and mostly a winning hand.